Free Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath) by Barbara Hambly Page A

irritation. Bektis said, “I’m not going to risk the child running away.” He was rubbing and polishing the device that he wore over his right hand with a chamois; the great jointed encrustation of crystals and gold locked around his wrist, gemmed the back of his hand and his arm, and the knuckles of two of his fingers, with slabs and nodules of coruscant light. Polishing meticulously, obsessively, now with the leather and now with one of the several stiff brushes he took from his satchel, as if he feared that a single fleck of grease from dinner—which Hethya had cooked—would lessen its lethal power.
    He had killed Rudy with it.
    Tir shut his eyes.
    He had killed Rudy.
    When he shut his eyes he could still see his friend, his mother’s friend, the man who was the only father he’d known.
    Hand lifted, the pronged crescent of the staff he bore flashing light, levin-fire showing up the crooked-nosed face, the wide dark eyes. Working magic, fighting Bektis’ spells so that he could rescue him, Tir, get him away from those people who’d somehow made him think that Rudy was with them all the way up the pass, that Rudy was there telling him it was okay to go with them.
    He could still see the fake Rudy melting and changing into a black-skinned bald man, a man he’d never seen before, like those two other identical black warriors who’d come out of the woods to follow them toward the pass. Could still feel their hands on him, grabbing him when he tried to jump down from the donkey and run.
    Then Rudy had been there, with Gil and the Icefalcon, witchlight showing them up among the rocks and snow and inky shadows of the pass. Rudy running, zigzagging away from the lightning bolts Bektis threw at him, straightening up to hurl fire from the head of his staff, crying out words of power.
    The lightning bolt had hit him. And he’d fallen.
    Tir clamped his teeth hard to keep from crying.
    “Here you go, sweeting.” He heard the rustle of Hethya’s clothes—she’d changed back into trousers and a man’s tunic and coat—and smelled the scent of her, thicker and sweeter than a man’s. He smelled, too, the roasted meat and the potatoes she carried in a gourd bowl and opened his eyes.
    “Please untie me,” he whispered. He wriggled his wrists a little in the rawhide bonds, trying to ease the pain. The coarse leather had blistered his skin during the day and the slightest pressure was a needle of fire.
    “I’m sorry, me darling.” She picked a fragment of meat from the dish; she’d already cut it up for him. “His High-And-Mightiness seems to think you’ll run off, and thenwhere would we all be?” She blew on the meat to cool it. Steam curled from it, white in the firelight.
    “Please.” He tried not to sound scared, but panic scratched behind the shut doors in his mind. The Dark Ones coming. The wizards in the camp setting out flares, setting out what looked like stones, gray lumps woven around with tangled tentacles of iron and light. Fire columning up from them, the wizards’ faces illuminated, tattooed patterns lacing their shaved skulls and grim fear in their eyes. His father’s warriors bracing themselves with their flamethrowers and swords, and the one wizard who’d been engulfed by those rubbery tentacles, falling away from their grip only a heap of red-stained, melted, smoking bones.
    It was only a memory. It had happened thousands of years ago. The Dark Ones weren’t coming back.
    Hethya made a growl in her throat, glanced back at Bektis, and pushing Tir around by his shoulders, yanked the knots free of the bindings. The rawhide jerking away brought tears to his eyes, and the cold in the open cuts was excruciating.
    She turned him around back. “Just till you finish eating, mind,” she said.
    Tir whispered, “Thank you.”
    “Not so fast, child.”
    Bektis rose from his place by the fire, crossed to where Hethya sat tailor-fashion in front of Tir, Tir kneeling with the food bowl between his